Creative Mandolin Backup with Sharon Gilchrist | New Live Workshop Series

Learn to vary your rhythm and backup playing by using double stops, walking lines, chord inversions, and more. Starts Wednesday, September 11, and includes video records of live sessions!

By: Dan Gabel

September 2, 2024

We hope you can join us for Creative Mandolin Backup with Sharon Gilchrist, an exciting new six-part live Zoom workshop series starting in September!

Sharon Gilchrist’s Creative Mandolin Backup workshop is designed for mandolinists who want to develop their rhythm and backup beyond the basic mandolin chord forms and chop or boom-chick rhythm. Mandolinists often concentrate most of their practice time focusing on building repertoire and learning to play great solos, but when playing with other people, whatever the style of music, the amount of time mandolinists spend playing solos is much less than the amount of time they spend playing backup.

In this workshop, Sharon will show you a few simple, easy-to-grasp concepts that will help you vary your backup playing. These concepts will allow you to improvise and respond to the instrumentalists and/or singers you’re playing with. She will talk about playing chords in different registers of the mandolin, adding sevenths to a chord when you want to move in a certain direction, creating walking lines with double stops and chords, varying your rhythm patterns, accenting the ends of verses or different parts of a tune, and more. These concepts will allow you to be more engaged the entire time you’re playing and contribute more to the overall sound of the music, which will make the entire experience of playing with other people more dynamic, alive, and fun.Watch Sharon’s full workshop introduction video, above, to hear some examples of what she’ll be teaching in this unique workshop!

Sign up for Creative Mandolin Backup with Sharon Gilchrist!

Creative Mandolin Backup is designed for intermediate-level mandolinists who will be expected to know basic open and chop chord (Monroe chord) forms, but for those who need to brush up on (or learn) these basic mandolin chord forms, we’re providing three lessons from Sharon’s Beginning Mandolin course on Peghead Nation. You can use those lessons before the course begins or refer to them as the workshop proceeds.

The six live Zoom sessions will be held every other Wednesday from 5:00 to 6:30 pm PST (8:00 to 9:30 pm EST), starting on Wednesday, September 11, and ending Wednesday, November 20, 2024.

The fee for the six-part Creative Mandolin Backup series is $200 and consists of six 90-minute live Zoom workshops. Each live workshop will be recorded in high-quality video and audio and edited for viewing and study both during the course and after its conclusion. Live workshop registrants will retain permanent access to Creative Mandolin Backup as part of their Peghead Nation account after the live sessions are over.

Sign up for Creative Mandolin Backup with Sharon Gilchrist!

Sharon Gilchrist began touring the national bluegrass circuit in her home state of Texas for several years before earning a BA in Mandolin Performance at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. For two decades, Sharon has performed with many of the groundbreaking legends in bluegrass and new acoustic music including The Peter Rowan and Tony Rice Quartet, Scott Nygaard and John Reischman in The Harmonic Tone Revealers, Darol Anger, Tony Trischka, The CA Bluegrass Reunion Band, Laurie Lewis and the Right Hands, Uncle Earl and many others. She is also a respected and influential music educator offering private mandolin instruction, multiple online mandolin courses at Peghead Nation (see below) as well as teaching at music camps internationally. From 2004 – 2012, Sharon taught mandolin at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design. In 2024, Sharon joined the John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project as a featured artist and co-producer on their Vol 2. album. The Vol. 2 album will be released in early 2025. Sharon lives in Nashville, TN and currently performs with the John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project Trio.

Check out Sharon’s other courses on Peghead Nation – Beginning Mandolin, Intermediate Bluegrass Mandolin, Bluegrass Mandolin Fingerboard Method, Melodic Embelishment